[The third post in a series on becoming a Christian physician. Earlier posts are Do You Want to Be a Doctor? and Helping People Is Not Enough]. After working 24 hours on call in the pediatric ICU, I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep, but friends had recently been reminding me of the health benefits of breakfast, so I dragged myself to a local diner for breakfast and sat at the counter next to a father and his little daughter. "We graduated from the booth to the counter," he was explaining to the waitress, … [Read more...] about In Its Time
career
Helping People Is Not Enough
[This is the second post in a series on becoming a Christian physician. The series began with Do You Want to Be a Doctor?] "Why do you want to work in healthcare?" "I want to help people." This dialogue is the most common conversation people will have about a career in medicine. The way we think about healthcare professionals tends towards the poignant and provocative: heroic paramedics and EMTs in ambulances, austere physicians and pharmacists and lab researchers in crisp white coats, dutiful and deeply … [Read more...] about Helping People Is Not Enough
PhD or No PhD. That is the Question.
Although Kate's a professor in the Humanities and as such adds to the archive of material addressing Why Get a PhD in the Humanities?, she also opens up the question to PhD or No PhD? In response to her excellent post, I desire to take the opportunity to extend a call more broadly to faculty across higher education to share their reflections on the topic by leaving a comment/reflection below or by contributing a post of their own. To learn more about posting on the blog, click here. Note: if you are a student who … [Read more...] about PhD or No PhD. That is the Question.
Success, Failure and the Protestant Work Ethic
Not long ago I wrote an Emerging Scholars Network (ESN) blog post about my experiences on the tenure track, sharing my concerns about whether I would get tenure and contemplating my priorities. I wanted to think through whether tenure even should be my primary goal, and what I would give up to achieve it. It was encouraging to me to see that I'm not alone, and that others feel some of the same pressures I do. Thank you to those who commented. Looking back, though, I realized that I made some generalizations that I … [Read more...] about Success, Failure and the Protestant Work Ethic
If that’s where you want to end up, I wouldn’t start here
The poets talk about life as a journey. But that just makes me wonder - in what space are we traveling? What metric can we use to assess distances? What sort of path-finding algorithm should we use? Will there be a giant ball of metaphorical twine along the way? When I was asked to write a bit about my journey, I figured it would be easy; I'm the world's leading expert after all. However, after several attempts, I could never get it to fit into any sort of particularly compelling narrative. It felt like a just-so … [Read more...] about If that’s where you want to end up, I wouldn’t start here